lunedì 11 aprile 2016

BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art,
Gateshead presents Present Continuous, the UK’s first comprehensive monographic
exhibition by Omer Fast. On view until June 26, 2016, the exhibition is
comprised of new and recent work. Fast is best known for video works that
question the conventions of storytelling, media reportage and historical
representation. He employs cinematic techniques and complex narrative structures
to explore the ways stories, and consequently history and identity, are formed.
Undermining the divide between reality and representation and between document
and artifice, his practice also interrogates the status of the image.
Divided over two floors, the exhibition includes seven installation and
projection-based works beginning with CNN Concatenated (2002), an 18-minute-long
video collage edited from thousands of individual words spoken by presenters on
the Cable News Network. The footage is reconstructed to form a disconcerting
poetic narrative with an underlying sense of threat. The first floor of the
exhibition presents Continuity (2012) and Spring (2016). Continuity, first
presented at dOCUMENTA (13), follows a young soldier returning from Afghanistan
to a home situation that is increasingly uncanny as his authenticity is called
further and further into question. Spring, a new commission made for the
exhibition, expands his tale. Presented on five screens it is a portrait of two
young German men whose lives intersect violently. The work delves into emotions
of longing, loss and revolt before reaching a surprising end from two different
perspectives. The exhibition’s second floor includes a presentation of 5,000
Feet is the Best (2011) at cinematic scale. Underpinned by an interview Fast
conducted with a former operator of Predator drones, the film weaves together
the operator’s account of his life and work along with scenes depicting crimes
in and around Las Vegas. Shown in proximity, Everything that Rises Must Converge
(2013), follows four adult film performers during their day at work in the San
Fernando Valley. The film is presented as four simultaneous projections. And
finally, Looking Pretty for God (2008) and A Tank Translated (2002) present
documentary portraits edited from conversations the artist recorded with funeral
directors in the US and the crew of an Israeli tank. The two works are presented
on small screens scattered throughout the exhibition. Despite their often
overt political content, the narrative constructions and deviations of Fast’s
videos ensure they transcend the issues he at first seems to address. It is,
rather, the traditions of storytelling and its role in creating fact and
identity that is central to his work. Present Continuous is accompanied by a
major new publication with new essays by writer and critic Jennifer Allen,
author Tom McCarthy, BALTIC Chief Curator Laurence Sillars and a conversation
between Omer Fast and Jeu de Paume Curator Marina Vinyes Albes. The full scripts
of each film included in the exhibition are also reproduced. Publication
available from shop.balticmill.com.